THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

BY ROBERT FROST

ABOUT THE POET

� Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America.

� The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 as the first poem in the collectionMountain Interval. Among English speakers and especially in North America it is a comparatively famous poem. Its central theme is the divergence of paths,.

� The main theme of the "The Road Not Taken" is that it is often impossible to see where a life-altering decision will lead. Thus, one should make their decision with confidence. It is normal to wonder what the outcome would have been if the other road, the road not taken, was the road chosen. But to contemplate this hypothetical deeply is folly, for it is impossible to say whether taking the other road would have been better or worse: all one can say is that it would have been different.

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“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB

� The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-travelled road.

� The central message here is that, in life, we are often presented with choices. When making a choice, one is required to make a decision. Viewing a choice as a fork in a path, it becomes clear that we must choose one direction or another, but not both.

� In "The Road Not Taken," Frost does not indicate whether the road he chose was the right one. Nonetheless, that is the way he is going now, and the place he ends up, for better or worse, was the result of his decision.

� The road, itself, symbolizes the journey of life, and the image of a road forking off into two paths symbolizes a choice.

� In "The Road Not Taken," Frost primarily makes use of metaphor. The whole poem is an extended metaphor and the road acts as a metaphor for life.